“You okay, Dad?”
I press the wind-button on the watch. The backlight goes out. “Fine, Teddy.”
“Elijah Fenton and I are friends again,” Franklin says.
“Did you apologize to him?”
“I didn’t have to.” Franklin shrugs. “He didn’t say anything about it.”
Something parental I should say here, something about responsibility or contrition, what’s the word…the other side of forgiveness…aw hell…I can’t come up with it.
So I concentrate on the road. Drive now; parent later.
I squint. It’s cleared up again this afternoon, the cool winter fog keeps burning off, leaving no place to hide, and the crisp air throws me; the world is washed out, shimmery. Like a twenty-degree desert. Tree limbs crook accusingly in the wind, and leaves
leap at our passing. I can see deep into the cars around me, and it’s like looking into people’s souls. We round the corner to our house, I’m still shaking, breathing shallow and raspy. We crawl down our block, limp into the driveway.
How is it that I keep forgetting that my front yard is full of lumber?
“Wow,” says Teddy. “What’s all the wood for?”
“That…was a mistake,” I say. “They’re coming to get it tomorrow. They delivered it to the wrong house.”
“The wrong house?” Teddy asks. “That’s too bad.”
Kid, you have no idea.
“It looks like Jenga,” says Franklin.
And this causes me to start crying again. It was Franklin’s favorite game a couple of years ago, Jenga. We played every night before I tucked him into his little bed, his feet curled up beneath him. I stare at the beams in my front yard, stacked crosswise, and it comes to me that life is a version of that children’s game: pull one from the bottom and stack it on top and try to keep the whole thing from falling. Slide a board out, stack it on top, the structure growing taller as the weight shifts upward, until the base begins to look like lattice, and pretty soon you realize you’re holding your breath, that there are no more safe moves, but still you must try, always try, because that’s the game…so you look for a board to slide, gently…slide…gently…even though you can never win, and it’s always the same…breathless and tentative…the world teetering above your head.
CHAPTER 24
SLURRED SPEECH, STUTTERING OR speaking in monotone
lapses in judgment and trouble with visual recognition
a loss of impulse control, dizziness, nausea and
erratic behavior, along with severe disorientation
all caused by a steep decline in neural activity
which can lead eventually to severe hallucinations
delirium, delusions, manias, even psychotic breaks-
then death-
And then, there’s sleep deprivation as torture, of course. It’s one of the oldest tortures there is-relatively clean, no scars-a big hit at Gitmo. There’s an old account by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who was sleep deprived by KGB officers in the 1970s. He described “a haze” from which his “spirit” was “wearied to death.”
That about describes it: haze. Spirit wearied. Death.
I put my head down on the desk for a just a second to think and-
The front door opens downstairs.
I sit up. It’s dark outside. Shit, what time is it?
I hear the front door close.
Where am I? Push back from the desk.
She’s climbing the steps.
My face feels rubbery. Can’t focus.
She pauses at the office door.
She’s silhouetted: “I got your message.”
“What?” I wipe the spit from my mouth.
Voice quavering: “In the front yard?”
Groggy, I have no idea what she means. What time is it?
Her eyes are strange-unfamiliar. “For what it’s worth-”
“Do you…know what time it is?”
Her eyes shut. “When did you become cruel?”
I meant it as a question, not recrimination.
“And they’re coming to take that wood away?”
Oh, right. The wood. “Tomorrow. Look Lisa, I-”
She walks away. Our bedroom door eases shut.
Then the day comes flooding back to me…righteous Randy and nasty Reese…tree-fort wood…CI OH-2. Oh, and I have a watch! A dark, unactivated watch on my wrist! So I know the
time…quarter to six. No wonder I’m disoriented; I think I’ve actually gotten an hour of sleep. I shake my head to clear the static and then walk to our closed bedroom door. I put my hand against the cool wood. So here we are. Now what?
I can’t hear anything in there. But behind that door is our bed. (So tired…) If I could just somehow get to the other side of this door, climb into that bed, and we wouldn’t have to speak, wouldn’t even have to face each other…I put my hand on the cold knob. I swear, we wouldn’t have to say a word, she could just settle in behind me, her knees nestled behind mine, and we could sleep until-
“Dad?” I turn. Franklin is wearing his art hat-a paint-splattered Angels cap that he wears whenever he breaks into his craft caddy.
“Hey pal.”
“I need to ask you something.”
“Sure.” I follow him into his bedroom. Here we go.
In his fussy, cluttered bedroom, Franklin has his easel set up in the center, a big piece of butcher paper clipped to it. He’s done a crude painting of Godzilla (Franklin is working through a monsters motif in his art right now, this, a classic interpretation-scales down the back and on the tail, three claws on each heavy foot, fire coming from the gaping jaws.) On top of the painting he’s written, “To Elijah. I Am Sorry.” And on the bottom, “From Franklin.”
